Bitt, my wife's trouble started as a herniated disc. Because of her youth the doctors were VERY reluctant to do surgery. I forget all of the details, but they did some lesser surgery that made it better for a couple of years- then it came back in full force. At this point they did an xray and found that the disc was now in a state of degeneriation. I"m not sure if this is a normal progression for herniation (doesn't seem like it would be) and that's when they had to do the fusion. The fusion fixed the problem (and the leg pain), but unfortunatly had some nerve damage, which we are now trying (only somewhat succesfully) to treat.

Our experience seems to be on the more rare end of the spectrum, and like I said, I'm not sure how often a herniation leads to the kind of stuff that she experienced. But that is our story, FWIW.

I do second the invovlement of a neurosurgeon, though. We are only now getting a neurosurgeon invovled (the others were back specialist) to help with the pain management.